"Good news, kiddies. We've got a man down the hall whose bones are breaking if you poke him," House announced. Foreman, Chase, Thirteen, Kutner, and Cameron all stared up at their boss.
"And this is good news… how?" Foreman asked. House threw a file at his face in place of any reply. He caught it and opened it to find that it was the patient's medical file. Before House finished handing out the files, Chase got an idea.
"How old is the patient? Brittle bones often come with old age," Chase said. House threw a file his way, effectively hitting him in the nose. Chase winced and opened the file. "Okay, so he's 26," Chase mumbled.
"Exactly. If he were 62, I wouldn't have taken the case," House said.
"It could be Osteomalacia. That can be caused by a vitamin deficiency or be familial," Taub suggested. House threw a highlighter at him, apparently in the mood for throwing things.
"Read the whole thing, idiots. You're offering me Osteomalacia, Rickets? He's got no family history of Rickets and he's a health food nut. Again, if either of those things were true, I wouldn't have taken the case. God, you'd think I hired you all only for your looks," House shot him down.
"Tch, you did," Cameron murmured. Thirteen gave a sharp exhale next to the blonde, smirking in agreement. House gave his best offended look.
"I only hired the girls based on their looks. And Chase," House defended himself. Chase gave House a "what the hell?" look, but House had already moved on.
"He broke his femur because someone dropped a book on it. That's one of the strongest bones in the body, and all it took was a little English lit to crack it," Thirteen pointed out. "He's in grad school, right? It's hard to get through that without a lot of caffeine." House planted a cup of coffee in front of her that he'd been holding.
"Good, we're getting somewhere. Chase, go ask him how much coffee he drinks a day. Foreman, go get him a bone scan. Thirteen and Cameron, I want you to go to his house and do a search for caffeinated products and what else the health nut is consuming, especially in case he's lying," House ordered.
Thirteen stared at House for a moment. He gave her a blank look in return, which was a clue that he had not so innocent intentions. Thirteen then turned to Cameron. "I'll drive," the brunette offered. Cameron nodded, and the two left for the parking lot.
A few minutes later, and the two women were in patient's house in Trenton. The doctors searched the house for any caffeine products or any other environmental instigators that might explain the patient's bone softening.
"Don't you think it's a little crazy that we're doing this?" Cameron asked suddenly. Thirteen glanced at her, putting down the large container of coffee grounds she'd been holding.
"Do you mean breaking into a house? Or the 'we' part?" Thirteen asked. Cameron's brow knit together like the other woman's question made her a little unsure. Thirteen thought it was adorable the way worry caused such a visible reaction on the blonde's face.
"Both, actually. I mean, House knows that I don't really think this is moral, but he sent me with you, someone who doesn't care about the morality," Cameron observed. Thirteen chuckled softly.
"That paints a lovely picture of me," the brunette replied. Cameron's face turned to one of regret instantly.
"No, no, that's not what I was trying to say. It's just-" Cameron scrambled.
"House, yeah, I get it. You think he's messing with you again by forcing you to work with someone he sees as your opposite," Thirteen finished for her. Cameron nodded helplessly.
"I didn't mean to say that you have no morals. I mean, who am I to make that judgment?" the older doctor assured the other while riffling through the cabinets.
"The compassionate doctor that always makes the right decisions?" Thirteen surprised her coworker by actually responding to the rhetorical question. "And I'm the heartless and self-destructive one," she added. Cameron shook her head.
"I don't always do the right thing, and I don't believe everything the rumor mill has to say about you, Doctor Hadley," Cameron said, looking Thirteen in the eye. The younger doctor was surprised; not only did the other doctor discount the stereotypes placed on both of them, but she also addressed her by her name, not the meaningless moniker House had been too lazy to remove. Actually, she was surprised Cameron even knew her last name given how no one, except rarely Cuddy, seemed to use it.
Cameron cleared her throat and broke the eye contact, pointing to the array of caffeine products assembled on the counter. "We should get back to the lab," she recommended. Thirteen nodded and the two left for the hospital.
"So, while you two were gone having much more fun than the rest of us, our patient started twitching and developed tachycardia," House informed the returning two doctors.
Cameron gave House an exasperated glare. "We weren't having fun, we were just collecting data on the patient's caffeine sources," she corrected House. House gave her a defensive look matched with his hands in the air in front of him in a surrendering pose.
"I wasn't inferring anything else. But breaking and entering is always more fun than drawing blood and doing bone scans," House denied any implications.
"Tachycardia plus the bone softening indicates a caffeine addiction. Caffeine is also a diuretic, which would cause it to flush out most of the calcium in his carefully controlled diet. That in turn would cause the bone softening. We found enough Red Bull and soda as well as coffee in his house to stimulate such an adverse addiction," Thirteen summarized.
"Good job," House said without much enthusiasm. Thirteen observed the man for any signs that he was messing with her, but he must have caught her looking because he added, "What, do you want a pat on the head? Go, leave," House asked sarcastically and shooed the doctors out the door.
"No, I don't want your hands anywhere near me," Thirteen replied coolly. She stood to leave, following Cameron out the door.
"I wasn't saying I would. I was thinking Doctor Cameron could take care of anything that involved putting hands on you," House snarked. Thirteen let out a sigh and left the room without another word.
Once in the hallway, Thirteen walked beside Cameron. "I don't know what's with him recently," she said.
"For some convoluted reason, he wants to mess with my life. It's not just the slip I made about my sex life- he also has heard that I broke up with Chase, and that makes me a bigger target for his assery," Cameron explained. Thirteen tried to ignore the sudden curiosity she felt on the subject of Cameron breaking up with Chase, but a question slipped out of her anyway.
"What happened with Chase?" she inquired, wanting to retract the question as soon as it left her mouth. Why had she asked? The two of them weren't exactly friends, and Cameron's love life was of no concern to her.
Cameron's face hardened, driving Thirteen's mental self-flagellation even more. "I don't really want to talk about it," the blonde replied, effectively closing off the topic completely.
"Sorry," Thirteen murmured. Cameron glanced at the other doctor in surprise. It wasn't a sarcastic apology like she'd expected, rather it seemed as though the younger doctor really regretted bringing up the subject.
"It's fine," Cameron replied with a more tender voice than her previous remark. The two looked at each other for a moment, Thirteen noticing the softness in the blonde doctor's expression.
"Alright, well I guess I should go inform the patient that he's not dying, but that he should really work on his caffeine addiction if he wants to keep his bones," Cameron said, turning down a hallway with a final smile at the brunette.
Thirteen walked the rest of the way toward the clinic where she'd been headed alone, pondering the day's events. House was certainly up to no good, but that was normal. Thirteen wasn't so sure that Cameron was his only target. After all, why would he have paid her to make Cameron uncomfortable when he could easily have done that himself? It was his specialty.
Then there was how he'd purposely paired the two women up on a task outside of the hospital. She wasn't complaining, because it had been sort of nice to talk to Cameron, something that she didn't usually do. Thirteen wasn't exactly the kind to make friends easily, so she hadn't really gotten to know the other woman very much except through what the other doctors at the hospital said about her. The first thing she'd ever heard about Cameron was that she was absolutely gorgeous, which turned out to be true. She'd also heard that the blonde woman was extremely caring, that she made strong moral decisions, that she had married a dying man, and that she was dating Chase. All of that she knew, but she hadn't even had a conversation with her that lasted more than five minutes before today.
The brunette doctor shook her head, trying to put thoughts of House's games out of her mind, which she did successfully. The other thoughts, the ones pertaining to the woman at the center of his antics, however, did not fade away as easily.